Category Archives: Poetry

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Some say they reign in fire
Some say in ice
From what I’ve seen of warm desire
I hold with those who fly with fire
But if I had to choose twice
I know enough of evolution
To say I’d follow ice
Though deepest yet is the intuition
That lightning must suffice
For from the moment we are born
There is no shelter from the storm

Watch the faint haze of morning fog at daybreak
acquiesce to the self-same silence
of sewage dripping from the drain, such superfluous sound
as Mama Earth caterwauls from her grave
unheard. Let no curmudgeon juxtapose
a ripe red rose with the rosy cheeks
of a child in heat, or the metaphor of lovemaking
with fever. Let no mayor gentrify
the streets of East St. Louis, or D.C., or Raleigh
because history is no palindrome and the wealth they build tomorrow
will not serve the starving today. Let no man testify
how indubitably he must shut down the schools
to stop the drug sales in the schoolyard
or checking birth certificate at bathroom stalls
until he has breathed the perfume of perfunctory pollution
and placed leaded water upon his parched tongue
marches to the end of the bus line begging
while his pleas meet the only answer he has ever given
when the poor and the weak stumble at his knees.

The top of my head
feels hollow
fills with sounds and delusions
that echo
in time with my heartbeat
my pulse
the flow of electrons
through neurons
between where my finger
slides through graphite
on paper
to where my shoulder
hinges at my neck
and past my dry mouth
sagging cheeks
and languished eyes
so I stop thinking
drained by prayer and famine
to observe
the world as it wavers and twists
lilting sideways
as my steps lurch forward
the passages of overhead conversations
like “It’s crazy
in the hands and feet alone
are half the bones
in the body”
and my feet are tired from standing
my hands are numb
from holding open this Book of Life
reading all the words
to find my name
to realize
my hands carry this weight
as much as my feet
that half my body is assigned
to doing
so half my mind
as it withers in sacrifice
should find itself trained
not upon being
eating, drinking, desiring
but doing.